Monday, May 16, 2011

Mike Huckabee'sannouncement on Saturday that he would not run for president in 2012 isn't a great loss, either to Republican party prospects or to America's political options. In the former case, he still would have faced all the opposition and condescension which came at him from the Republican establishment in his 2008 run, and he wouldn't have been able to beat Obama, not with the moderate business Republican class fleeing him or at least staying home, as they almost surely would have done. And in the latter case, Huckabee today, after years in the Fox News hothouse, is no longer someone who is presenting particularly original (if sometimes off-the-wall) solutions or directions to the American electorate, as he once was. He's found a well-remunerated niche on Fox, he's building a house in Florida, he's speaking his mind, he's done.

Which is too bad--because while the loss of Huckabee 2011 isn't much to mourn, the loss of Huckabee 2007, years ago, is truly unfortunate. Ross Douthat's column yesterday explains why:

[Huckabee will] be missed because he embodied a political persuasion that’s common in American life but rare in America’s political class. This worldview mixes cultural conservatism with economic populism: it’s tax-sensitive without being stridently antigovernment, skeptical of Wall Street as well as Washington, and as concerned about immigration, family breakdown and public morals as it is about the debt ceiling.

This combination of views represents one of the plausible middle grounds in American politics. You can find it in the Republican Party, among the evangelicals and Catholics whose votes made the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush possible. You can find it among independent voters, particularly in what a recent Pew report calls the “disaffected” demographic, whose hostility to big government coexists with anxieties about corporate power and support for redistribution of wealth. And you find it in the Democratic Party as well--from the dwindling ranks of pro-life Catholic liberals to the “Bill Cosby conservatives” in the African-American middle class.

But few of these people are members of the American elite. Call someone a “centrist” or a “moderate” in the salons of Washington or New York, and everyone will assume that you’re talking about a deficit hawk who supports open borders, or a Republican C.E.O. who writes checks to Planned Parenthood. Among our leadership class, centrism invariably means some combination of big-business conservatism and social progressivism--the politics of pro-choice Republicans, hedge fund Democrats and Michael Bloomberg independents....

[H]is candidacy illuminated a path that more politicians should take. We live in an age of economic stagnation and social crisis, and the two are intimately connected. The collapse of the two-parent family and unfettered low-skilled immigration have made America more stratified. The Wall Street-Washington axis really did drive the country into a ditch. For all his faults, Mike Huckabee knew how to talk about these problems. Now we need leaders with ideas for what do about them.

Douthat missed including Huckabee's own best line in describing the "moderates" of our business-centric political class, and particularly of his own party: he saw in them a "new brand of libertarianism", reflecting "a social liberalism and economic conservatism", and often a "heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism" at that. Which I think is, frankly, pretty accurate. (Just give a tip of the hat to the ideological consistency of Rand Paul, as he bravely notes that creating a system premised upon the idea of empowering people by ensuring them a right to health care is functionally equivalent to treating human beings as property.)

I was alwaysfond of Huckabee, both as a governor of Arkansas and then later as a presidential candidate. He had a smart record in how he responded to some truly complicated problems, dealing with education, health, immigration, and more. He was not a basher of government, nor did he have a Pavlovian anti-tax response to every possible suggestion that the government might have to play a role in addressing the nutrition of children, the solidity of marriages, the cleanliness of the environment, as so forth. He stood up against the state gambling lobby; he crafted the best compromises he could in conjunction with the need to consolidate school districts; he thought limited cap-and-trade restrictions ought to be put into place to combat greenhouse gas emissions; and he was almost unique amongst nationally known Republicans to have never trafficked in mindless, paranoid attacks upon President Obama's religious faith or Michelle Obama's anti-obesity campaigns. Or at least--he was unique in that regard, until the need to keep audiences tuned into to his talk show got the better of him, and he started cranking out books like his latest, Simple Government, which, as I paged through it a couple of nights ago at a local bookstore, seemed to have been written by an almost entirely different person than the conservative quasi-populist of four years ago.

Douthat has mourned what he calls "the tragedy of Sarah Palin", a presumably talented and smart political negotiator who let herself embrace her own worst caricature. I would mourn a smaller, but I think more ideologically significant tragedy--the loss of Mike Huckabee, circa 2007-2008. What if Fred Thompson had never wasted his own time and the airwaves of South Carolina attacking Huckabee, his only rival for the hard-core Southern evangelical vote, and Mike had managed to beat Mcain there? What if perhaps no more than 10,000 Republican primary voters in different states hadn't been turned off by Mike's populist rhetoric, and instead had given it some though, and enabled him to win Missouri and Oklahoma, which he could have used to springboard into further contests? What if there'd been a brokered convention--indeed, what if Huckabee had been the GOP nominee in 2008? What would have Huckabee--a fellow who had campaigned against big business and Wall Street and "the establishment" throughout 2007--have done as a presidential candidate when the financial meltdown began in the fall of 2008? At the very least, wouldn't it have opened the door for Obama to have staked out more populist, more regulatory responses, than what we ultimately got? Even if Huckabee had lost--and he would have lost to Obama, there is no doubt about that; much as I kind of like the guy, and admire is one-time moral communitarianism and economic populism, I wouldn't have voted for him--a rhetorical foundation might well have been laid that would have led to a very different (and far less paranoid) sort of anti-government response than we've seen over the past couple of years. Huckabee, in losing in 2008, could have done more to create a better balance in our perpetual struggles over government power and spending than anything we've seen sense.

Of course, that's all speculation. And it's doubly groundless speculation when you look at Mike Huckabee today. Perhaps it doesn't amount to tragedy--but it is a small loss, nonetheless.

1 comment:

I thought that Matt Yglesias got this about right, especially in that Douth was most right about Huckabee when noting that in the end he just had tricks and crank ideas- nothing serious at all, and no indication that he was serious about learning.

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/05/the-limits-of-mike-huckabee/ That was true of Palin, too- I see no reason to think she was smart- cunning and ruthless, maybe, but no indication of smart.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."